Stop Press

PROLOGUE

The Spider began his career as a common criminal. Or perhaps as almost a common criminal, for it is arguable that from the first the scale of his operations lifted him slightly out of the rut. He did little practical work himself and into the normal haunts of his kind—pothouses, thieves’ kitchens, shady pawnshops—he was never recorded to have strayed. He lived, much as a morally blameless rentier might live, in a largish house in the country, with an establishment running to a butler, two footmen, and a secretary. The secretary it is true was blind, which is unusual and slightly sinister in secretaries: the tap-tap of his stick as he went about his employer’s confidential commissions was one of the most effective strokes in the décor of the Spider. But the servants were wholly normal and wholly unsuspicious of their master’s real profession. Sitting in a library of old books the Spider controlled from afar a nefarious organisation of surprising complexity. This, presumably, is why he was called the Spider. He was fond of quoting from the poet Pope of whose tangled bibliography he had a connoisseur’s knowledge—and to unruly lieutenants he would point out in a coldly terrifying way that his touch, infinitely fine, felt at each thread and lived along the line. He kept a private wireless transmitter concealed in a cocktail cabinet.

About halfway through his career, the Spider underwent a change of character. Hitherto business-like and almost conscientiously diabolical, he now became intermittently chivalrous. More than once he was known to free a beautiful girl from the embraces of a brutalised accomplice and deliver her unscathed to an opponent—an opponent who, although boneheaded, was bronzed, gentlemanlike, and himself much too chivalrous to enlist against the Spider’s organisation the prosaic assistance of the police. About the same time the Spider developed a philosophy of property. He would compare himself now to Robin Hood and now to the oil and steel kings of the United States. He took from the rich and gave to such people and causes as a really wise and nice man would give to. This went on for some years.

Then came a further change. It seems to have been the result of a confused period of gang-warfare in the course of which the Spider acquired a machine-gun and an armoured car. They proved unsuccessful investments—England was too small for them—and for a time the Spider appeared to be getting nowhere. This check precipitated the crisis. There is no record of it, but the struggle was doubtless severe. The Spider emerged with moral perceptions which were wholly orthodox. His passion for the perpetration of crime became a passion for its detection. His old way of life ceased to exist except in so far as it gave him useful insight into the minds of his new quarry. The rich now came to him fearlessly and he solved their strangest perplexities with unfailing success. Those who had not known him for long wondered why he was called the Spider at all, and one or two who had read Swift thought he might better have been called the Bee. He was not wholly on the side of sweetness and light.

He began to keep bees. He improved himself in the art of music and became a finished executant on the clarinet. And in other ways his domestic life was modified. His house, though still in the country, was smaller. The books were even more in evidence and to Pope had been added Shakespeare, Wordsworth, St John of the Cross, Hegel, Emerson, and Donne. The Spider had grown remarkably literary: sometimes more literary than anything else. The wireless transmitter had disappeared. In its place the Spider had found a bosom friend, a retired engineer who accompanied him everywhere and wrote down everything he said, always without any inconvenient penetration into why he was saying it. But the engineer, though not clever, was literary too. He and the Spider were never so hot on a trail that they would not stop to bandy a little poetry by the way. The poetry was delightful in itself. And it served to distinguish the Spider in what was becoming a seriously overcrowded profession.

Mr Richard Eliot, the creator of the Spider, had not meant to do it. Or not as much of it as he eventually found himself doing. The first Spider story, he would say in that allusive literary way which was growing on him, had come into the world with the same apology as the baby in Mr Midshipman Easy: it was only a very little one. And, curiously enough, it had been the product of unnecessary fastidiousness.

Some twenty years before this chronicle opens Mr Eliot had inherited a largish house in the country and here he lived as any morally blameless rentier might live. He superintended unremunerative agricultural operations in an amateurish but competent way. Occasionally he ran up to town for the opera, the exhibitions of the Royal Academy, interviews with his stockbroker, and the Eton and Harrow match. It was the Eton and Harrow match of 1919 that was critical in his history.

This match took place three days after the birth of Mr Eliot’s second child. For the first time Mr Eliot entered his club in St James’s as the father of a son. And he there found a number of his contemporaries who were already the fathers of Etonians and Harrovians—for Mr Eliot had married somewhat late in life. It at once became clear to Mr Eliot that Timothy must go to Eton. The decision was, it has been hinted, unnecessarily fastidious, for the education of a gentleman may be received at a number of less expensive schools. But every Englishman will understand Mr Eliot’s processes of mind.

Mr Eliot, then, put the infant Timothy down for Eton and went home to count the cost. It promised to be considerable: moreover there was the possibility of further sons being born to him, and it would hardly be fair to send Timothy to Eton and his younger brothers to lesser schools. And this was the point at which Mr Eliot remembered that he was by way of being a literary man. Years before, and during his short service in the Indian army, he had printed a couple of sketches in a regimental magazine. His friends had liked them and he had been encouraged to send a short story, full of careful local colour and the correct reactions to physical danger, to a London editor. The story was published; others succeeded it; and in those severely unillustrated magazines that lie about in clubs for the recreation of the elderly, Mr Eliot’s name was for a time frequently to be remarked. But when he retired to the English countryside he dropped this habit of authorship. He was no longer in contact with the tigers and fakirs he had been in the way of writing of, and he found that he remembered surprisingly little about them. Moreover he was becoming rather too bookish greatly to enjoy writing; he had a fondness for Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and others of whom there is singularly little to be said. On his favourite poet Pope he became quite an authority; and he sometimes dared to wonder if there might not be room for a monograph, of an unassumingly scholarly sort, to be called ‘Pope’s Use of the Terms Nature, Reason, and Common Sense: a Study in Denotation and Connotation.’ Rough notes for this opusculum, together with a neatly typed title-page, lay about on Mr Eliot’s desk for years.

That Mr Eliot, thus circumstanced and thus inclined, should have invented the Spider in order to provide schooling for his son is something on which he himself probably came to look back with a good deal of perplexity. Partly it was due to that realistic turn of mind which made him a tolerably competent gentleman farmer. A sum of money was required; literature might provide it; so Mr Eliot sat down and read Anthony Trollope’s Autobiography, that textbook of the economics of authorship. He then reflected on the numbers of people who read old-established magazines in quiet clubs and compared them with the numbers of people who have to read what is readily readable in noisy tubes and buses. From these reflections emerged the Spider.

But there was more to it than this. Had the Spider been merely an economic expedient Mr Eliot, who was not venal, would never have called him forth from the night of his forebeing. The truth is that to his realism Mr Eliot united a restless fancy, and to his mature if rather ineffective literary culture a juvenile taste for vicarious romantic adventure. In devising the highly improbable adventures of the Spider he was weaving his own magic carpet. At the outset nobody enjoyed these adventures more keenly than their inventor. His imagination was of the refrigerating sort from which the fantasies of boyhood can step with convincing freshness; and it was this quality, no doubt, that made the stories the instant and almost embarrassing success that they were. Nor at first was Mr Eliot’s bookishness a handicap. Rather it helped him to a useful critical control of the magic carpet, so that his contraptions of the sort flow straighter and cleaner than most. And it gave him from the start a good deal of craft. He had pondered Gulliver’s Travels and knew that the best way to pass off an improbability is to set another improbability hard up against it. He knew that literature is naturally divided into ‘kinds’, which the writer mixes at his peril. The early Spiders kept carefully within their own ‘kind’.

And they were a success. A fatal moment came when Mr Eliot ought to have stopped—and didn’t. After that there was no stopping. An adjoining estate came into the market and he bought it. It ate money. So did various indigent relations, including a couple of disreputable cousins whom the good news brought hurrying home from the colonies. And soon on the continued activities of the Spider a score of remoter livelihoods came to hang. There was the old lady who dramatised and the young man who did the films; there was the American agent who had contrived to marry Mr Eliot’s niece; there was the little staff at Mr Eliot’s publishers which ran the absurd and irritatingly successful Spider Club; there was an amusing Jew who called himself Helmuth somebody and did translations into German, and there was the same Jew calling himself André something else and doing translations into French. For a time there were even three young women in Chelsea who proposed to paint the Spider, together with Sherlock Holmes and kindred notabilities, on crockery designed for the modern home—but at this Mr Eliot rebelled, and by buying back these particular ‘rights’ for an exorbitant sum nipped the nascent industry in the bud.

For years, then, the Spider contributed to the gaiety of nations. But Mr Eliot, who had been brought up to believe that life should be earnest as well as gay and sober as well as fantastic, became more and more uneasy at the increasing demands which the Spider made upon his energies. For months on end he was obliged to submerge himself wholly amid such absurdities and improbabilities as are agreeable to a well-balanced man only on an occasional lazy evening by the fire. It was rather like living out one’s span of days in a cinema or through an unintermitted succession of dramas. And whenever he proposed to emerge or wake up he knew that the old lady who dramatised and all the other servants whom the Spider had gathered about himself trembled for their bread—or at least for their cake. Mr Eliot, who was kind-hearted, liked to think that there was cake all round; in a way it made up for his disappointment over Timothy. For Timothy had not gone to Eton after all. A precocious interest in educational theory, coupled with an equally precocious strength of will, had taken him to a modest co-educational school such as his father might very well have afforded without once setting pen to paper. So Mr Eliot had to comfort himself with the thought that his activities brought unexpected prosperity to a number of indifferently deserving people. But he came, it was believed, to feel positively uncomfortable about his creation.

The decidedly protean character of the Spider was no doubt due to this uncomfortableness. There would come a point at which Mr Eliot could no longer contemplate the Spider as he was—whereupon there had to be a change. These changes, each of which had thrown Mr Eliot’s publishers into a sub-acute agony, were by a strange fatality always overwhelmingly successful. Kindly reviewers spoke of the progressively revealed complexity, the subtle maturing of the Spider’s character, and when he finally came over wholeheartedly to the side of law and order his conversion was the subject of approving comment from more than one distinguished pulpit. Mr Eliot himself, as the Spider pursued malefactors dramatically about the globe, had for a time the illusory sense of being the henchman of a sort of cosmic police.

Novelists have often recorded the almost uncanny way in which their everyday life has come to be influenced by their own creations. The beings of a writer’s imagination are said to throng and press about him and even to impose for a time their own fictitious personalities upon the real personality of their creator. And it may be supposed that when a writer makes of a single character a companion for life and experiences in his company a series of adventures terminable only by death he may come to be haunted by this single dominating creation in an extraordinary way. Perhaps this happened to Mr Eliot. It is certain that in the Spider’s final phase the Spider and Mr Eliot became a little mixed up. There was a disconcerting novel in which a good deal turned upon the Spider’s habit—hitherto unknown to his admirers—of writing stories about tigers and fakirs. And there was an increasing element not only of literary allusiveness in the badinage between the Spider and his friend the engineer but of realistic and unromantic matter on the problems of English landowners and the condition of English rural society. Against these hazardous trends more than one interested party held complicated and costly insurance policies.

More and more, in fact, Mr Eliot and his interests seemed to be creeping into the world of the Spider. Was the Spider, the curious speculated, creeping correspondingly into the world of Mr Eliot? Mr Eliot’s own opinions were unknown. Probably he was undisturbed; it is noteworthy that none of his acquaintances had thought of him as a nervously unbalanced man. Nevertheless his acquaintances, observing that he no longer came up for the Royal Academy or even the Eton and Harrow match, suspected that all was not well with him; a few believed that he had conceived for the wearisome Spider something not unlike a mild obsessive hatred.

This was the situation when the thing happened.

PART I

RUST HALL

1

It was a November evening in Oxford and the air was stagnant, raw, and insidiously chill. Vapours—half-hearted ghosts on the verge of visibility—played desultory acoustic tricks about the city, like bored technicians flicking to and fro the sound screens in a radio studio. A wafer of eaten stone, loosened by a last infinitesimal charge of condensing acid, would slither to the ground with disconcerting resonance. The masons’ mallets, making good in random patches centuries of such mellow decay, tapped like so many tiny typewriters in an engulfing silence. The sky, a sheet of lead rapidly oxidising, was fading through glaucous tones to cinereous; lights were furred about their edges; in the gathering twilight Gothic and Tudor, Palladian and Venetian melted into an architecture of dreams. And the hovering vapours, as if taking heart of darkness, glided in increasing concentration by walls and buttresses—like the first inheritors of the place, robed and cowled, returning to take possession with the night.

‘Webster!’

The young man who had turned so abruptly out of the porter’s lodge ignored the call. He had an athletic figure of the slimmer sort, disproportionately attired. Round his neck were accumulated a sweater, a towel, a blazer, and a large muffler; below this level he wore nothing but a pair of shoes, and diminutive shorts cut in the faith that the squatting position is the only one known to man. This peg-top appearance is common in those who have just come off the river, and there was nothing out of the way about the young man except the haste which had suddenly possessed him. As if the ghosts had verily appeared to him, he ran. Ignoring another friend’s call, he charged across the college lawn—a route which would have cost him five shillings had a traditionally minded don observed him—tripped over the college tortoise, recovered, skilfully swerved round an advancing tray of crumpets and anchovy-toast, dodged through a narrow archway and pounded up a dark and ancient staircase. A dim person, whom the youth hailed as Webster had long believed to be a kitchen-man but who was in point of fact the Regius Professor of Eschatology, stood politely aside to let him pass; he took the last treads at a bound, thumped at a door, pitched himself precipitately through it, and collapsed into a wickerwork chair—a chair, like his shorts, moulded to a theory: this time that man sits not, but either curls or sprawls.

Gerald Winter, the don who owned the room, surveyed his panting visitor, enunciated with simple irony the words, ‘Come in,’ and helped himself to a muffin from a dish by the fire. Then, resigning himself to the exercise of hospitality, he said, ‘Muffin.’

The young man took half a muffin. Presently he scrambled up the back of the chair and reached himself a cup and saucer. ‘I’m frightfully sorry,’ he murmured conventionally as he poured out tea, ‘to burst in.’ He jumped up and foraged three lumps of sugar. One he ate and the others he dropped with a splash in his cup. And then he sat down again, looked warily at his host and fidgeted. ‘Frightfully sorry,’ he repeated inanely and vaguely. He was a young man with a firm mouth and a resolute chin.

Winter made a movement after the kettle that concealed a scrutiny of his guest. ‘My good Timmy,’ he said—for it was only Timothy Eliot’s closest friends who were privileged to call him Webster; and Winter, who was merely his tutor, was not of this degree of intimacy—‘My good Timmy, not at all.’ He began to fill his pipe, which was a ritual indicating a mood of sympathetic leisure. He was by no means attached to the role of confidential adviser to the young; nevertheless this job frequently fell to him. Troubles material and spiritual came regularly up his staircase, sometimes at a resistless bound, sometimes with the most dubious pauses landing by landing. The Professor of Eschatology had formed the conclusion that Winter was a sinisterly sociable person. Actually Winter was rather shy and when he heard these characteristic approaches he frequently took refuge on the roof. But Timothy Eliot had caught him and now he said briefly: ‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s the Spider.’

Winter looked gloomy. If there was anything tedious about Timmy it was a chronic sensitiveness about this harmless invention of his father’s. Since coming up to Oxford Timmy had been constrained to endure a good deal of fun about the Spider, for it is a characteristic of undergraduates to revive kinds of humour in abeyance since they left their private schools. There was, for instance, the amusement of addressing Timmy out of what was called Webster’s Dictionary: which meant weaving into conversation—if possible undetected—phrases from the earlier and more picturesque conversation of Mr Eliot’s hero. And there was the solemn assumption that Timmy himself was the author of the books, this being an ingenious way of avoiding the impropriety of making direct fun of a man’s parent. The jokes about Webster Eliot were judiciously intermittent—to harp on them would have been boorish—but Timmy, while playing up to them amiably enough, was reputed at times to brood over the curious family industry which was the occasion of them. So now Winter sighed and said dryly: ‘Oh, that.’ He felt that he was unlikely to be helpful about the Spider.

But Timmy shook his head. ‘It’s not,’ he said, ‘just the old quiet fun. It’s something queer at home. Something—well—that seems to be happening to Daddy.’

To Winter, Mr Eliot the elder was not much more than a name and an odd reputation. He thought it sufficient therefore to indicate conventional concern. ‘Happening?’ he murmured.

‘Doomed to the bin.’

‘Doomed to the bin—the Spider? You mean he’s being scrapped?’

‘Not the Spider, Daddy. And I mean he seems to be going gently off his rocker. Taking something to heart. I don’t know quite what to do about it. Awkward thing in a family. I thought you might think of something.’ And Timmy, with a fragment of muffin he had reserved for the purpose, began mopping up the surplus butter in the muffin dish. He did it in jabs that echoed the jerky sentences.

There was a little silence. A bus rumbled down the High and Winter’s windows rattled angrily; from the quad below floated up the voices of hearty men discussing a football practice. Winter straightened himself, feeling that somnolescence was no longer decent. ‘The facts,’ he said.

‘Very simple. He thinks the Spider has come alive.’

‘Come alive?’ Experience with undergraduate predicaments did not prevent Winter feeling uncomfortable.

‘Just that. Pygmalion and Galatea situation. The beloved marble stirs and lives. Only Daddy doesn’t greatly love the Spider.’

Winter looked at his pupil suspiciously. ‘What—if anything—has actually happened?’

‘A joke—put across by some precious ass on Daddy. And it’s been too damn successful.’ Timmy pushed the empty muffin dish away ungratefully. ‘Doomed to the bin,’ he repeated and seemed to find comfort in this succinct statement of the worst.

‘Surely it’s not as bad as all that. Whatever the joke may have been, your father will presumably forget about it in time.’

‘You haven’t got the idea. The joke’s still going on.’

‘Oh!’ Winter looked disconcerted.

‘It’s quite a tale—and goes back some months. I expect you know how a person in Daddy’s situation may be pestered. He’s read by hundreds of thousands of people, and that means by hundreds of mild pests. There are always a few badgering him. They’re being poisoned by their wives or shut up as mad by their uncles or systematically persecuted by the Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canterbury. In the old days they sometimes complained that the Spider was after them with a gun. You can imagine all that.’

‘Effortlessly.’ Fellows of Oxford colleges, Winter was thinking, are seldom subjected to such paranoiac importunities and would be uncommonly worried if they were. ‘I gather you’ve even been badgered a bit yourself.’

‘Oh, that. It was a bit bad at my prepper. They called me Miss Muffet. That was worse, somehow, than Webster. I’ve never minded much since, really. Do you know that at Balliol there’s a man whose father is the world’s biggest manufacturer of —’

‘No doubt. But to your tale.’

‘Well, it’s characteristic of these badgerers that they fade out. I suppose when they get no change they turn to badgering someone else. That’s one thing that makes the present badgerer unique: tenacity. And there’s another. Daddy’s had lots of messages and so on about the Spider as if he were a real person; he’s never had any from the Spider as if he were a real person.’

‘Surely it’s an obvious enough joke? You don’t mean to say’—there was decent anxiety in Winter’s voice—‘that your father is seriously—’

‘This badgerer,’ Timmy interrupted, ‘knows too much. He has a sort of slogan: The Spider Knows All. And apparently it’s more or less true.’

Winter looked up sharply. ‘Timmy Eliot, don’t talk nonsense.’

‘It’s not nonsense. It’s the point of the whole thing. This badgerer knows what only the real Spider could know.’

‘The real Spider?’

‘Oh, dear, I mean the real Spider—the one in the books.’

Winter stirred uneasily in his chair. ‘You are sure,’ he said, ‘that you are not a badgerer yourself, trying to pull my leg? Or that you haven’t been reading too hard?’

The young man opposite stretched himself in feline luxury in his rowing kit. ‘Do I look,’ he asked, ‘like a Grammarian’s Funeral? And I’m really quite serious. This person pretending to be the Spider knows what only the real Spider could know.’

‘Timmy, you’re saying something meaningless. What you call the real Spider isn’t a person with a brain and knowledge. He’s a number of black marks printed on paper. This person can’t know what only the Spider could know.’

‘Prosaically true. But he knows, Daddy says, things that the Spider of the books thought of doing, and didn’t. In other words, he has a supernatural insight into Daddy’s mind.’

Another bus lumbered down the High and again the windows rattled as if in the clutch of an angry demon. Far away, muffled in the thickening air, a deep bell began to toll.

‘It started,’ said Timmy, ‘in the long vac. With the perpetration of a very elaborate joke. The person chiefly concerned is a Mrs Birdwire, and first I must tell you about her.’

‘I seem to have heard of her. A traveller, isn’t she?’

‘Yes. Only you mustn’t call her that: she doesn’t like it. The explorer. Mrs Birdwire the celebrated explorer. She’s our nearest neighbour about a couple of miles off.’

Winter raised his eyebrows. ‘I didn’t know you were as isolated as that.’

‘Not our nearest local neighbour; our nearest county neighbour. Mrs Birdwire is the nearest polite society we have—she’s incredible vulgar, by the way—and Mrs Birdwire was burgled by the Spider. It was all very difficult. You see, Daddy and she have never got on.’

‘Embarrassing.’

‘Quite so. Mrs Birdwire was burgled and a lot of beastly trophies and curios and things taken, and the Spider left his celebrated signature: a large Spider cut out of black velvet. He left it in Mrs Birdwire’s very own bath.’

‘He always does that?’

Timmy blushed. ‘Rather foul rot, isn’t it? He used always to do something of the sort. Remember that the burglary was by the Spider of very long ago; he’s been doing nothing but detective stuff for years now. He had a bad throwback, so to speak, and burgled Mrs Birdwire. He also insulted her. You must know that there’s supposed to be a Mr Birdwire, though nobody has ever seen him. Mrs Birdwire’s formula is that he’s cruelly tied to the city, and there’s a joke to the effect that one day Mrs Birdwire may go exploring after him. Well, the Spider left a picture. It showed Mrs Birdwire in the fantastic tropical kit she’s photographed in, cutting her way through a jungle of telephones and typewriters to a little man who was sitting at a desk necking with a secretary. And underneath was written: Mr Birdwire I presume? Just like that.’

Winter gave a loud unacademic guffaw. ‘Crude,’ he said, ‘unquestionably crude. But satisfactory nevertheless. Where was the picture?’

‘Mrs Birdwire has built herself a house in an awful style she calls Spanish Mission—all white walls and little bogus wrought-iron grills. The Spider chose the biggest, whitest wall he could find and did his drawing rather more than life size in red paint. It was a place of pilgrimage from miles around for days.’

For a moment Winter closed his eyes as if the better to visualise this revolting manifesto. ‘Timmy,’ he said, ‘you fascinate me. But let me say that your linguistic habits are appalling. Consistently to refer to this joker as the Spider is sheer encouragement to the confusion of mind which you say has overtaken your father.’

‘It seems convenient. Actually, I ought to have spoken so far of Spider One.’

‘Spider One?’

‘The master-crook. You see no sooner was Mrs Birdwire burgled by Spider One than Spider Two—the super-detective of recent years—fell to and began clearing the matter up.’

‘The dickens he did!’

‘Spider Two — Daddy’s Spider Two—has a habit of reading newspaper reports of mysterious crimes and then sending the police vital hints which they’d otherwise have missed. Mrs Birdwire’s Spider Two did just that. The red paint had been bone dry when the gardener discovered it early in the morning. The Spider wrote to the police and pointed out that the only ordinary paint that would dry as quickly as that was some foreign stuff that was just beginning to be imported in small quantities. And sure enough that gave the police a line they’d missed. They traced a purchase of this stuff from a London warehouse by an unknown customer. This unknown had paid cash and asked that the stuff be delivered at some address in a suburb. It was duly delivered at an empty house and the unknown was there to receive it; he seems just to have commandeered an unoccupied house at random, breaking in at the back. No trace of him was ever found again. But Mrs Birdwire’s curios and what-not were neatly arranged round the floor of the principal room. If Spider Two hadn’t pointed out a valid detective process they would presumably never have been recovered. The thing, in fact, was a large, broad, pointless joke. Am I most frightfully boring you?’

‘I repeat that I am fascinated. Your story opens vistas of bewilderment. May I remind you, however, that you have yet to explain —’

But Timmy Eliot had jumped up. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘will you come down?’

‘Come down?’

‘Home with me for the weekend to see if we can get to the bottom of the business. I expect you can work me an exeat from Benton. And dons are always weekending.’

Winter scrambled from his chair, genuinely perturbed. ‘Young man, steady on! And will you tell me why you have suddenly come to me with all this in such a hurry?’

‘Will you come down?’

‘And just what warrant may there be for the fantastic statement that this joker knows things your father’s precious character thought of doing, and didn’t?’

Timmy grinned, as if conscious of the strength of his bait. ‘That’s the real beguilement, isn’t it—how can a joker give the impression of peering into a writer’s mind? Once more, will you come down?’

Close by the chapel bell began its urgent and perfunctory peal. Winter glanced at a calendar, dived for his surplice. ‘Lord help me!’ he cried in despair. ‘I have to read Numbers xxxiii and I haven’t looked up the pronunciations.’ He turned to Timmy. ‘To your bath. And if you breakfast with me at half past eight I’ll make up my mind then.’

Left to himself, Winter gave a moment to the dubious contemplation of his fire. In Timmy Eliot’s story there was a hint of matter sufficiently baffling to interest him; nevertheless he was inclined to call himself a fool for half-promising to investigate. He hurried downstairs with a mounting sense of his own rashness. In the quadrangle he ran into several of his colleagues and drew comfort from the thought that the adventure, should he undertake it, would afford a holiday from familiar faces.

As it happened, this was a miscalculation. A good many familiar faces were to take part in the comedy of the next few days: some of them were actually about him in the quadrangle now. And the comedy was to be of the classical sort which is based on character. But for Gerald Winter’s rashness—but for a rashness which repeated itself almost within the hour—the history of a celebrated writer of romances would have been wholly different.

After-dinner procedure in the senior common-room is dictated by Dr Groper. The little table, the middle-sized table, the big table, and the supernumerary table are his idea.

A distinguished mathematics and for long Master of the college, Dr Groper worked out his system during the anxious period when Oxford was awaiting the news of Waterloo. His dispositions have been respected ever since for the simple reason that he made a considerable endowment of the college cellar dependent on them. It is true that in the mid-nineteenth century a radically-minded Master, who was voraciously sociable and objected particularly to the little table, persuaded his colleagues to take legal advice. But learned counsel, after studying Dr Groper’s will with the help of several Cambridge mathematicians, delivered the opinion that the system is rational, reasonable, and in no way repugnant to the public interest; in fact that if the system goes, half the cellar fund must go as well. The system has never been questioned since.

Dr Groper desired that an edifying time should be had by all, and by all equally; and to the realisation of this proposition he dedicated his science. The after-dinner hour, he believed, is peculiarly propitious to those sudden starts of mind by which the boundaries of human knowledge are extended. Periodically, therefore, a scholar should have the opportunity of discussing his port in meditative seclusion. Hence the little table, which stands apart and furnished for one in a corner of the room; here every Fellow of the college must take his place in turn and await such inspiration as may visit him. Next comes the middle-sized table, which is for three; here Dr Groper hoped for fruitful discussions of a sustained and serious sort. The big table is for seven, and at this conversation is naturally more general and fragmentary; Dr Groper mentioned in his will that he solicited innocent mirth. And this completes the normal arrangements. The college is small and these eleven places accommodate the Master and statutory number of Fellows. Their orderly progression night by night from table to table would be a simple affair but for the complication introduced by occasional guests. When such are present they are entertained at the supernumerary table by the Master, the Dean, and the Fellow who would normally sit fifth at the big table supposing—as is not the case—that no guests are ever entertained on Sunday. It is this last provision that makes the calculations a little complicated; it was instituted by Dr Groper as likely to maintain the standard of mathematical study in the college. And over the system’s learnedly ordered convivialities the figure of Dr Groper still presides in the shape of a portrait by Raeburn. A puffy man in rusty clericals, he stands pointing with an incongruously military gesture at the open page of his own justly celebrated Commentary on Newton’s Principia. Beside him rests a brilliantly rendered silver and brass orrery. A touch of that gesturing hand—it seems—would set planets and moons on their intricate dance about the sun. But Dr Groper’s eye is outward over the common-room, as if controlling the scarcely less elaborate and secular gyrations which his will has imposed on generations of scholars unborn.

Into the familiar embraces of the Groper system came Gerald Winter and his colleagues after hall. They had been obliged to walk across two quadrangles in a drizzling rain—for the life of dons is a sublime mixture of snugness and unnecessary inconvenience—and Winter watched with an abstracted eye the little huddle of gowns, umbrellas, and table-napkins sorting itself out in the porch. It was, he thought, rather like a congregation of magpies; of moulting magpies, he added—acknowledging to himself that he was in doubtful humour. In chapel Numbers xxxiii impromptu had not been a success. His delivery had been confident, even slightly bored. But Mummery, the Mods tutor and the acknowledged eccentric of the college, had taken it upon himself to utter a loud and scornful exclamation upon each mispronunciation in that grotesque catalogue of names—an effect the more pleasing to the assembled undergraduates in that Mummery’s reactions appeared to issue involuntarily from deep sleep.

Winter was glad to see Mummery being directed to the little table. It was one of the horrors of Dr Groper’s system that one never knew from evening to evening with whom one must consort. The suspicion was current that old Puxton, the mathematical tutor who had charge of the arrangements, had long since lost his grip of the necessary calculations and resorted to mere bluff; on one occasion when the Professor of Eschatology had been required to sit at the little table three nights running there had been quite a scene. Dons are in general a mildly gregarious sort of men, and nobody except Mummery relished Dr Groper’s periodic seclusion. Mummery cheated. The little table, being a little table, was easily movable, and it was Mummery’s habit to edge it within earshot of the middle-sized table. He was thus able, while seemingly in a profound abstraction, to practise that trick of significant ejaculation which had been employing against Winter in chapel.

Winter, meditating in increasing irritation the riddle of the Spider’s prescience, found himself directed to the middle-sized table along with the Master, Dr Bussenschutt. A moment later they were joined by Benton, the senior tutor from whom Timmy’s exeat would have to be obtained. No arrangement, Winter reflected, could have been more dismal. Benton believed that Bussenschutt drank. Bussenschutt knew this. Bussenschutt affected to believe that Benton had an out-of-the-way vulgar accent, and he was in the habit of consulting undergraduates from remote parts of the country in an effort to identify it. This Benton knew. Bussenschutt had once overheard Benton say that Winter thought that Bussenschutt was the very type of the scholar who has never mastered his Latin grammar; and this had confirmed Bussenschutt in his conviction that Winter was, intellectually at the least, dishonest. Winter and Benton disliked each other, as a matter of mere instinct. And on mere instinct they both disliked Mummery, whose table was now levitating stealthily nearer. Mummery, in a moment of some little unrestraint, had once apostrophised Bussenschutt as a hoary-headed and toothless baboon and Bussenschutt, declaring that nothing could be more unacademic than such language, had preached a powerful sermon against Mummery on the text The name of the wicked shall rot. It was the business of all four men to work closely together on the production of a learned journal called Comity.

Bussenschutt sat down and eyed his companions with the greatest geniality. Then, preserving the same expression he directed his glance to the decanter. ‘Ah, the Smith Woodhouse late-bottled? A wine invariably brilliant on the table.’ He poured out a glass. ‘And the bouquet immense.’

‘I deprecate,’ said Mummery loudly, and appearing to address Dr Groper over the fireplace, ‘aroma in ports.’

Benton shifted his chair so as to have his back squarely to the little table. ‘I wish,’ he said, ‘we might see the Fonseca ‘96.’ Benton was an anxious and nervous person, looking much before and after; his conversation was frequently despondingly optative. ‘I do wish we might have the ‘96.’

Bussenschutt cracked a walnut. ‘The Fonseca? We are to have it up for Founder’s Day at the end of the month. By the way, I have had a letter from Jasper Shoon.’

‘From Shoon, the armaments man?’ said Winter. Winter’s mind sometimes strayed to public issues.

‘From Shoon, the collector?’ said Benton. Benton always maintained the attitude of a pure scholar.

‘Indeed, yes—Jasper Shoon. Winter, have I not heard you maintain that port is not a right wine?’

‘The intellectual pleasure of drinking wine,’ said Winter with the distaste of one forced to reiterate a stale aphorism, ‘is never fully yielded us by port. Shoon?’

Bussenschutt, without at all discomposing the geniality of his features, placed his lips in a whistling position and slowly mingled port and air. ‘I would not deny,’ he said with irritating deliberation, ‘that a great claret is the true close to a meal.’

‘If only,’ said Benton, ‘they would learn to decant such clarets only when the dessert is being placed on the table. You were remarking that you had heard from Shoon.’

‘To be sure—Shoon. You support me, my dear Benton, in the impression that the vintage ports are maturing more quickly than of old?’

Benton, distracted between alluring topics, turned his head nervously from side to side somewhat like the donkey between two carrots. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I agree. And I wish we had laid down more 1917. And more 1920. We should feel much stronger.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I wish I knew Shoon.’

‘Shoon?’ said Bussenschutt dubiously, as if the name had been mentioned for the first time. ‘Oh, yes indeed. He has made a most interesting discovery. Winter, the decanter stands.’

Winter, his own thoughts divided between the Spider and this alien but beguiling topic with which Bussenschutt was toying, pushed along the port. At the little table Mummery was making a long-drawn whiffling noise—his habit when engaged in concentrated eavesdropping.

‘Shoon’ said Bussenschutt, ‘has purchased a most remarkable papyrus.’ He cracked another walnut. ‘A document, my dear Winter, preserved on the ancient writing-material made from the stem of Cyperus Papyrus: you understand me?’ It was one of Bussenschutt’s most annoying tricks to affect momentary fits of abstraction during which he would address his colleagues as if they were junior undergraduates. He turned again to Benton. ‘You say we are insufficiently provided with 1917? A pity. It is a year that is already in very good condition.’

‘And 1920,’ said Benton.

From the little table came a sound as of the final moments of an emptying bath. Mummery was expressing impatience and indignation.

‘1920?’ murmured Bussenschutt, looking at Benton with a great appearance of bewilderment. ‘Nay, my dear fellow: 407. I said 407.’ Mummery’s noises ceased abruptly. And in Winter’s mind the Eliots retreated defeated.

‘And with what,’ said Bussenschutt, contriving to look round the table as if it were a little gathering in a lecture-room, ‘do we associate the year 407 BC? Let me tell you: it is with the rebuilding of the Erechtheum. And now let me say a word on papyri in general.’

‘Really, Master,’ said Benton, ‘this is an affectation in very poor taste. Both Winter and I are abundantly conversant with papyri in general. I wish —’

‘As you are aware, our extant papyri, with the exception of those discovered at Herculaneum, all come from Egypt. But this papyrus comes from Athens. It seems to be nothing less than one of those two on which we know from an inscription that there was entered a fair-copy of the